Religion and Science: No Big Deal

Religion and science are often portrayed as two separate and opposed things. Depending on the person portraying them, they may be seen as adapting to one another, or as conflicting with one another, or as fundamentally at odds with one another, where only one can emerge triumphant. This idea is nonsense.

"Religion" is really much too broad a term for this discussion, including as it does theology, theodicy, liturgical practice, common prayers, social structures, and a whole slew of other possible fields, so let's narrow it down a bit. When people say that science and "religion" are in conflict, what they probably mean is that science and God, or our notions about God, are in conflict. So we're really talking about theology and science.

To determine whether they are in conflict, or even in any relationship at all, we must determine what we mean by these two terms. First, "science".

According to Wikipedia, science "is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe." But this is far too broad; for example, it includes astrology, which does the same thing (and which is, unlike science, completely whacko).

What's the difference between science and something like astrology, then? Science builds and organizes knowledge by means of a specific method (namely, the scientific method). Specifically, in science, we build and organize knowledge by making an observation; by positing a hypothesis to explain that observation; and by testing our hypothesis by experimentation. (Simplified here, of course; but that's the basic thought.) Others can test our hypotheses by attempting to repeat our experiments, or by showing why our experiments don't really show what we think they do, or by other means.

Science is great; in fact, history shows us that it's the best method yet derived for collecting and systematizing knowledge about the material world.

So what is theology? Well, according to Wikipedia, theology "is the critical study of the nature of the divine," and unlike the definition of science, this is pretty well-tailored for the subject. In theology, we take what we know about the divine and we reason about it to come to conclusions. In the Catholic tradition, this means that we take the sources of divine revelation (Scripture and Tradition), along with the conclusions that we can draw from our natural reason, to think about God and the things of God.

So what is the "conflict" or "convergence" between science and theology? The simple answer is that there is none. Either way; they are neither in conflict nor converging; they are just two separate things, like baseball and football.

Science, by the very nature of its methodology, deals with things which can be measured. If it can't be measured, then science has nothing whatsoever to say about it. One will notice that God, at least in most monotheistic conceptions, cannot be measured. He cannot be touched, measured, recorded, or otherwise subjected to experimentation. That means that the scientific method is simply inapplicable to God; He's just not something that science can possibly talk about. That not a bad thing; it's just a natural and necessary result of what science is. Science cannot make statements about God any more than deer can make statements about what it's like to be a dog. There's nothing wrong with either deer or dogs; it's just what they are.

Conversely, theology is not at all concerned with those things which can be measured; that is, with the material things that science is worried about. Theology is concerned, in fact, specifically with things that cannot be measured; namely, spiritual things. A theologian, like a philosopher, may analogize his reasoning to things in the material world, the way St. Patrick analogized the Trinity to the leaves of a shamrock; but this is an analogy, not an equivalence. If he's drawing conclusions about spiritual things from material ones, he must rely on the study of material things for his substrate; that is, he must rely on science for that.

So when a theologian says something like, "Theology proves that evolution didn't happen," he's going way beyond his field. (This is why very few Catholic theologians have ever said such a thing.) Evolution is just the gradual change of biological entities; namely, material things, things which we can measure. That's science's bailiwick.

Similarly, when a scientist says something like, "There's no such thing as a soul," or "there's no life after death," or "there's no God," he's going way beyond his field. The most appropriate question to ask when that assertion is made is, "Really? Show me your experiments." He may believe that there's no God, and he may have excellent (even though wrong) reasons for so believing; but he doesn't believe it because science proved it.

Let's consider one of the most common arguments that many scientists make for not believing in God: Laplace's famous reply to Napolean that he "n'avait pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là" ("had no need for that hypothesis"). It is, in the first place, pretty certain that Laplace intended, by this statement, merely to say that Newton was wrong in positing that God intervened directly periodically to keep the solar system from flying apart; and indeed, Newton was pretty wrong about that. (Newton, though a fantastic scientist in some ways, was curiously invested in mystical woo-woo in others.) But many people cite this statement to justify their lack of belief in God; they say that they just have no need of the concept of a supreme being.

Well, of course they don't, as far as the science is concerned. Science has nothing to say about a supreme being. Science certainly isn't in the business of positing the direct intervention of God in material events at various points, especially not in any systematic way. While those who believe in God should also believe in miracles, direct intervention of the divine in the material world, we call them miracles precisely because they are exceptional and not the rule. So if all you're thinking about is matter, the stuff that we can point at and measure, then you're absolutely correct to assert that there's no need to worry about God at all.

(One can, of course, prove the existence of God purely by natural reason; but not by scientific experimentation, and that's what I'm referring to here.)

It's precisely when you get to things that you can't measure that you need to start thinking about God, and that's something that science specifically forswears. It's not about things you can't measure. So when a person says that he doesn't need to believe in God to explain the universe, he really means that he doesn't need to believe in God to explain the material universe. He's assuming, in saying so, that the material universe is all there is.

That philosophy is called materialism. But note that I called it a "philosophy", not a science. That's because science can neither prove nor disprove materialism; all science can say is that, if there is anything immaterial in the universe, science itself isn't worried about it. Materialism, for the purposes of this little article, may or may not be true; but it can't be proven or disproven by scientific experimentation. It's a philosophy; it must be proven or disproven by abstract reasoning.

Just like the existence of God.

So there is no conflict between science and theology; they're not even concerned with the same things.